Demandware has officially ascended into the clouds.
The ecommerce platform that Salesforce bought for $2.8 billion in June became Commerce Cloud Tuesday, and will gradually retire the Demandware brand.
Next step: integration.
While that process won’t be entirely onerous – Demandware and Salesforce Marketing Cloud clients have “significant overlap,” said Commerce Cloud marketing SVP Elana Anderson – there are some areas that can be shored up.
The ultimate vision is to enable data sharing across Salesforce’s multiple clouds, which include Marketing, Sales, Service and Commerce.
“In all honesty, we still have pipes to connect,” Anderson said. “Demandware was not built on the Salesforce platform, and we handled data exchange through API. The vision is to deliver a shared view of all the customer data, and that’s where we have work to do. But that single view of the customer data is the biggest opportunity for us.”
The hope is to connect the customer life cycle from discovery through engagement and purchase.
While it’s too early to share the timeline for when that might happen – Anderson said the two companies are still trying to integrate their staffs – Salesforce is still identifying strategy specifics and deciding what to enable first.
“As we work through product strategy, we’re understanding the points where it makes sense to tighten up and package integration,” Anderson said.
For instance, there’s a possible integration with Journey Builder, which helps marketers design what actions to take as customers progress through the funnel. Commerce Cloud and Journey Builder can’t currently be automatically integrated.
“That said, a common step in the customer journey of a retail buyer is shopping cart abandonment,” Anderson said. “That’s a natural handoff point between commerce and marketing.”
Once those connections happen, marketers can easily design workflows to re-capture those abandoned shopping carts, reengage lapsed customers or provide automation for replenishment.
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“Those are the obvious ones,” Anderson said, pointing out additional opportunities around Service Cloud and Sales Cloud, which hadn’t been tied to Demandware as frequently as Marketing Cloud.
Meanwhile, Anderson also sees opportunities to potentially extend Demandware to Salesforce clients who aren’t yet on the ecommerce platforms. “The reception in the marketplace to the acquisition has been very positive,” she said.
And Demandware is also leveraging Salesforce’s distribution heft to expand geographically. While Demandware has significant European business – slightly less than half of its revenue comes from Europe – Anderson sees “significant opportunities” in APAC, particularly Japan, which she said has a large B2C ecommerce environment, second only to North America.
